“And I did not know whom to suspect,” Grover took up his story. “Clues pointed this way and that. Appearances are easily falsified and I tried to dig past them to truth—only, I lacked the right hint, and never dreamed that a gem was to be stolen under the pretext of restoring it! That was easily planned, for once the gem had been seen, perhaps photographed with a watch-camera or some small photographic device, a man like Clark, working with him for a share of the profit from various gem sales, could reproduce in imitation the green jewel.”
Toby, he inferred—and the youth eagerly attested the truth of the inference—had been paid well, being a former helper at the Clark store on Fifth Avenue, but out of work—had been paid to sell the supposedly “real” Eye, its facsimile, for an absurd amount, as he had accepted a movie camera.
“I fell into the lure,” Grover hurried along, “because, for a time, the Tibetan Voice of Doom manifestation, and the robbery of our safe, confused me. It was easy to do that last by de-fusing our cellar switch-boxes, a point I had never thought of. Scientists, like criminals—or average people—trip up often enough on some minor point in a plan.”
Because the radio would allow him to be in touch, and for the sake of the travel, adventure and scientific aid Roger would get and give, his older cousin confessed that he had been glad to see Roger help the supposed replacement of a sacred relic.
“Clark was brought in cleverly by use of a record. It was the same one that had been used for the Voice here, and when the needle was dropped onto the unused part, it made a thump that was one of the sounds of a series of clues which puzzled Roger and me, because the appearance was that it was all one recording.
“The trip to Tibet went off as scheduled. Roger, really a sort of ‘bait’ because of his youth, was, as hoped, taken up to the lamasery as a sort of curiosity—a young American well up in scientific methods and operations. Innocently he played the thief’s plans, and still the very apparatus that he insisted on taking there made the lamas suspicious, especially one of their wiser men who had been out of their country, who understood English, and who had read Roger’s memoranda of radio talks to and from lamasery and camp.
“With Tibetan vindictiveness, they let him hear the Voice of Doom, probably operated by a concealed priest in the hollow image, and then consigned him, and Potts, to the tunnel. By sheer wit and scientific knowledge Roger found that he was in a sort of whistling tube, operated when the rock door was opened, by wind. He worked out, with Tip’s wise help, the secret, and they escaped.
“Clark, when Roger got to camp, took the supposed Eye and with Roger watching and unsuspicious, actually replaced the true Eye with the false one he and Ryder had brought along. He had another, and to make Roger think he was genuinely through with the stone, so as to be clear if any Tibetan revenge developed, he threw away one more imitation. Potts, worried about the levers having been wedged which he considered an error of judgment, went back to repair it.”
So interested were the men in following the developing solution that they had forgotten how bizarre was this relation of a mystery and its unveiling—to a beast.
The animal seemed fascinated, or cowed, or subdued in some way. Perhaps, thought Roger, the plight of the hidden keeper made it tame.